Portfolio

About Me

I'm a digital jack-of-all-trades, with experience in just about everything. I'm a passionate advocate of Open Source Software and Linux who enjoys contributing to projects. I'm an advanced Linux user, and have run Linux since 2009. I proudly administer my own server, so stop trying to brute force my SSH login. It won't work.

I'm also an aspiring writer, and an intermediate web developer, but regrettably not yet a programmer. I'm available for freelance work or as a remote employee and would love nothing more than an escape from the tedium of retail work.

Devil's Advocate

My own personal work. Devil's Advocate represents my first serious writing attempt. Though a work-in-progress, my hope is to find time to finish the story within the next year.

Devil's Advocate is the story of a young man named Axel, who is quite literally the right-hand man to the Devil. The story takes place in a single, expansive Afterlife. There is no Heaven, only a "Hell", though most people would find it quite comfortable.

Axel spends his day-to-day (after)life as a keeper of the peace. He is tasked with tracking down disruptive individuals and sending them back to the Devil to be judged for their deeds. It's all business as usual until a strange group of criminals learn to cross the borders that divide the Afterlife. What are their motives, and how did they gain this power? You'll have to read to find out.

Date: November 2013

Category: Writing

Writing

My own personal writing blog. I started this as a place to put works of writing that were not part of my main story. While there isn't much content here at the moment, I hope to return to it in the future and post semi-regular content.

Date: March 2015

Category: Writing

NotePaper

A web theme made exclusively for PicoCMS. I designed NotePaper for my own writing sites, but the theme is Open Source and available on GitHub.

NotePaper has grown to include a number of features, including widgets, a blog-style front-page, page-specific sub-navigation, next/prev arrows, integrated Disqus and Facebook comments, easy CSS customizability, and more.

The NotePaper Demo Site (which features the readme) includes extensive documentation on how to use and configure all the available features.

Also included are two sub-themes, one that is a color palette swap of the default and another that is entirely different. These are mostly included as an example of how you can create your own customized sub-themes using only CSS.

NotePaper represents a decent amount of work, and the time I spent learning the ins and outs of PicoCMS. Whether you're a seasoned web developer or a newbie, check out PicoCMS, and give NotePaper a try.

Date: June 2015

Category: Web

Colonies of Bryzen

Colonies of Bryzen is a webcomic I've started with my deaf, autistic brother Bryer.

Because of his handicaps, Bryer often struggles to grasp written language. Despite this, he dreams of being a manga artist (manga is a form of Japanese comics). Colonies of Bryzen (a name that he chose), is a way for Bryer to practice his drawing concepts while I assist him with the story and structure aspects of making comics.

Date: November 2015

Category: Writing

Pico CMS Documentation

I've also revamped Pico's Themes and Plugins pages to utilize a long-forgotten "portfolio" layout built-in to the website's theme. I've rigged up this gallery as a Jekyll template that generates the portfolio tiles automatically. This allows us to easily accept new submissions by simply adding new markdown files to their respective folders.

I've written an in-depth Guide that explains how to set up Pico running on Nginx.

I'm working on rewriting the entirety of Pico's Documentation as a series of guides. These will soon replace our somewhat inadequate single-page "Docs".

At the moment, I'm also responsible for management of the website itself, which is available on GitHub.

You can find proof of my work on the GitHub repository's Contributors page, under my GitHub username, smcdougall.

Date: July 2016

Category: Writing, Web

Freelancer

The theme of this very site, ported to Pico.

I was looking for a better theme to use as a portfolio for my work when I stumbled upon Freelancer. Certainly not the most flashy, but a decent and simple theme that I could port to Pico.

I did this by starting with the Jekyll Version and tweaking it to work in Pico. While Liquid is similar to Twig, a fair amount of modification was still required to change certain syntaxes and map the variables to their Pico equivalents.

The Pico version also includes extra enhancements, such as more customizable text fields, the ability to disable certain sections, and the ability to include your own CSS overrides for extra personalization.